Ordinary Accessibility: Redesigning the Private Rented Sector Through Lived Experience

The private rented sector (PRS) now houses one in five households across the UK. It is fast, competitive and increasingly central to how we live. Yet when it comes to disability and accessibility, it remains strikingly under-researched and under-examined.

Most discussions of the PRS focus on affordability, insecurity or regulation. Far less attention has been paid to how everyday letting processes such as property listings, viewings, permissions for adaptations, landlord decision-making, shape the experiences of disabled renters. In practice, accessibility is often treated as a specialist issue, an exception to be managed, or a risk to be avoided.

This new case study, developed through the Intersectional Stigma of Place-Based Ageing (ISPA) project, addresses that gap directly. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a disabled housing professional who founded an accessibility-focused property consultancy, alongside a landlord and an estate agent he worked with, the study gets underneath how the PRS actually works. It shows how exclusion is often embedded in routine processes designed around able-bodied norms: the speed of decision-making, the absence of reliable accessibility information, the default assumption that adaptations are temporary or undesirable.

The case study demonstrates how small, process-driven changes and inclusive design can have transformative effects and get to where we want to be by embedding accessibility filters into mainstream property searches; improving photography and listing information; training estate agents to provide accurate, timely information; reframing accessible features as assets rather than something that detracts from the property.

Disabled renters must be treated as ordinary customers navigating an ordinary market and not as a ‘problem’. When housing systems are redesigned with that starting point, we can combat stigma and the times were accessibility is treated like an add-on. This case study shows how lived experience can act as both a diagnostic tool and a catalyst for innovation. It offers insight for embedding accessibility into the everyday culture of the PRS, not as a niche add-on. None of this requires radical overhaul, but the research suggests that they are necessary steps to make accessibility ordinary and the default position.

You may also be interested in the other resources on our dedicated Private Renting webpage.